


Flowers Like You

by lavenderstages



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Death, F/M, Hanahaki Disease, Just lots of Angst, Spoilers for RDR2, but at the same time im not lmao, im so sorry, mild descriptions of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 11:39:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19019158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavenderstages/pseuds/lavenderstages
Summary: You have been in love with Arthur for the longest time, but been to afraid to say anything about it. Then everything changes.





	Flowers Like You

Lavender had never meant much to you.  
It was a pretty flower, one you had passed on forest trails and sprawling fields. One that dotted green pastures and soothed people to sleep when nothing else would.  
If it had to mean anything to you, it would mean absolution.   
Which was exactly how you felt about it now. Only there was so much more.  
Purple petals painted your clothes with the remnants of the rain from this morning as the heads of lavender sprigs brushed past you. Fondly you broke a head from its stalk, acknowledging it in your hand, feeling the rain pass onto your hand, but you didn’t look at it. You didn’t need to, you had seen so much of it recently. You doubted you would ever forget what those flowers looked like.  
You remembered the first time lavender held any new meaning for you.  
It was an afternoon in spring, at a camp that sat high above the rest of the world. You had words diligently all morning, so you could enjoy the first truly sunny day any of you in the gang had seen for a long while.   
Sneaking away from the camp you had taken your cigarettes and fled to a secluded area where you knew a rock you could relax on.  
When you found it occupied, you could hardly complain.  
It was Arthur, hunched over slightly and sat against the rock. He hadn’t noticed you, and for a moment you were scared to make your presence known. You paused for a moment as he worked away at his journal, you watched as he stroked the pencil to page with long broad motions and watched whenever he rotated the journal a little and continued.   
Eventually you walked forwards, announcing yourself cheerfully.  
“What’re you drawing?”   
Arthur bristled a little, shuffling where he sat and pulled his journal defensively towards him.  
“It ain’t nothing-“   
“I saw you. You’re definitely drawing somethin’. No point pretending” You interjected, smiling as he let out a breathy laugh.   
“Yeah, alright.” He rubbed his neck “but it still ain’t much”  
He was so gentle for a man of his appearance and lifestyle, you thought, as his hair dropped over his downturned eyes.  
“Still, if you don’t mind, I’d really like to see” you offered softly.   
After a second of deliberation, Arthur offered the leather book up to you. The page it was open on was covered in a wonderful pencil drawing of a field, filled with flowers.  
“It’s a lavender field I passed when I was riding yesterday, didn’t have time to draw it then” He comments.  
“It’s gorgeous” you say, lightly touching the paper with your fingertips.  
“Really,” you add when Arthur laughs to himself.   
“Just don’t go off that page” he adds with a laugh, its not a joke though, so you listen.  
“Course, you wouldn’t want me finding out who you’re sweet on or somethin” you tease, passing the book back to him. He takes it, shutting it and resting it on his lap, his fingers gently tracing circles on the leather cover. His head is lowered, eyes obscured by the rim of his hat.  
“Yeah, I wouldn’t” Arthur murmurs softly.  
Something in your chest pulls, and you almost swear you can smell those flowers. 

A few months later on the wagon trail, venturing through mountain paths and fields. That’s where you remember lavender the strongest.   
“Over there,” Arthur called back to you, pointing off to the side “that’s those fields I mentioned”  
From your spot in the back of the wagon you turn to face where he’s pointing.  
Peeking out from behind the trees is a sea of bright purple, nestled within green grass and practically glowing in the midday light.  
“It’s just like your drawing” you say.  
Arthur drops his head down and smiles, before gesturing for you to come closer. You slide over to him, resting your elbow on the back of his seat.  
“I saw this group of horses when I was there. Beautiful things they were. Big and powerful looking,” He tells you, and the look on his face as he recalls his encounter makes your chest feel warm and full.  
“You should head back there some day. See if you can catch one” Charles offers from next to Arthur as he collects the reigns of the wagon “If they’re as powerful as you say they are”  
“If they’re as powerful as he says then Arthur could end up trampled to death!” you laugh, giving Arthur’s arm a squeeze. The men laugh a little in response.  
“Yeah, after all this that would really be a way to go wouldn’t it” Arthur says with an infectious grin.  
“I can see the headlines already ‘Wanted outlaw Arthur Morgan trampled to death by field pony’ ” Charles adds, sending both you and Arthur into a fit of laughter.  
“Does have an interesting ring to it, doesn’t it” you say.  
“I don’t want anybody but Charles to write my obituary y’hear?” Arthur says, wagging a finger at you, to which Charles laughs.  
“Sure, Arthur” you smile, and he gives you a gentle one in return. He takes a shallow sigh before he speaks.  
“I’m in good hands with you two,” 

When the blood first came you had so many questions.  
What you once thought was a persistent cold turned worse quite quickly. The taste of metal in your mouth whenever you coughed too hard was something you decided to keep to yourself. The coughs were infrequent. Nothing to worry people about.   
Eventually you knew you needed to find those answers, and so riding to town under the guise of a supply run you prepared yourself for your fate.  
The doctor himself couldn’t quite be sure. He had told you it was too early to make a sure diagnosis.  
“Can’t you give me some sort of an idea?” you pushed, as the doctor wrote something down hastily.  
“I wouldn’t want to distress you,” He says, and you shoot him a dry look.   
The doctor puts his pencil down and fixes you with a stare.  
“Well it could very well just be tuberculosis” he says.  
“Just?” you ask.  
The Doctor doesn’t respond straight away, instead he gives you a pained look.  
“No,” you warn, sitting forward in your chair “I know that’s not possible”   
“It might not be that, but I suggest you at least… observe your relationships. However one-sided they might seem”

Your unnamed condition affected you in so many ways, you unintentionally distanced yourself from the others at camp, worried what they might think. The thought of them pitying you for your illness urged you away from them.   
Still, despite all this, you strongly denied what the doctor had insinuated. How could you suffer like that without a clear cause? 

But that first evening, a few month later, where you coughed and choked so violently, you had to flee to the edges of camp proved you wrong. Shaking fingers slipped down into your throat, and gagging, you pulled the long thin flower from your mouth. You held it in your hands, whole body shaking and heaving with gasps.   
And laughed.  
Laughed because the flower in your palm, despite being covered in blood and saliva was clearly a sprig of lavender.  
You laughed, because of course it was.

They weren’t always as bad as that first one. Usually you could hide the little bristles of purple within a handkerchief and discard of them later. Yet in a gang as close as this, nothing can be kept a secret for long.  
“Can we talk?” Arthur had asked one day, gesturing to his tent.  
And you did. You spoke, and you listened. You listened when Arthur told you he had tuberculosis, just as the camp suspected you did also. You simply nodded in response.   
“We aren’t so different, you and I” He had said as you left the tent “not now at least”  
You paused on your way out, swallowing the words that threatened to leave you.  
“Sure. The same” 

That night you had seen Arthur, sat in the lamplight of his tent. Propped up against the side of the ammunitions wagon, in his hands he held that pretty photograph of a lady he kept with him. You winced as you swallowed, your throat scraped raw and felt your chest constrict.   
It’s a foolish thing to fall in love with a friend.

You had heard it said that this disease choked people to death. The silky flower petals and thick blooming buds coated and clogged the airways until the bearer had no choice but to die. You doubted that would be the case for you. Each time you pulled another sprig of lavender from your mouth you had to fight back tears. These flowers would shred you from the inside out much sooner than they would choke you to death.

You rode back to the doctor, asked him what could be done. If anything could be done.   
“I’m afraid not,” he had said, observing the purple flower that you had hacked up not moments before. Swallowing, you prepared yourself to talk again.   
“What happens now then?”  
The doctor moved the bowl that contained the lavender from your view.  
“I hope you forgive me for being blunt,” he said “but now, I urge you to get your affairs in order, and try to make yourself comfortable”  
To that you let out a harsh laugh, your painful throat punishing you for it.   
“Perhaps tell the gentleman in question. It might ease your mind” he adds.  
“If I tell him will-“  
“-No,” the doctor interjects firmly “It will not go away.”  
You sink back against the chair. You felt lost. Without purpose. You hear the Doctor rotate the bowl of blood and flowers, observing it before he speaks.  
“It’s far too serious now for him to ever love you back” 

To breathe was a laborious task. To eat was torture, and to speak was out of the question. As your body thinned, so did the gang. Friends left and died, and still they had been none the wiser to the nature of your condition.   
You had stopped sleeping in the camp. Offering to take up guard duty at every opportunity, resting against the trunks of trees with your gun alone with your thoughts. And your flowers.  
Arthur had joined you once. Coming to sit down next to you in the darkness.   
“Night is always the worst isn’t it,” he says, and he’s right. Lying down makes your chest feel impossibly heavy, and often times you find yourself scared that if you go to sleep now, you won’t wake up come morning. Worried they’d find you with a particularly large cluster of lavender in your throat that you weren’t awake to hook out in time. Worried they’d find you as blue as the flowers that festered in your lungs.  
“Yes,” you rasped, not wanting to say much more through the pain.  
The silence grew heavy, and tentatively Arthur pulled you to his side. You let him move you, holding your head to his chest.   
“But we got each other, don’t we” he says, and it burns. The words burn your eyes and your mouth and your lungs. You allow yourself to let go, crying softly from where you are. Part of you wants to tell him. You want to yell at him, tell him what he’s done to you and how he’s killing you. But you can’t, because part of you dreams that if you tell him of your condition, he will hold you even tighter, tell you he’s always loved you and that this has all been a big misunderstanding. You find yourself dreaming, not for the first time that Arthur will make it stop. Make the pain go away.  
But you don’t say a thing. That heavy feeling in your chest stays, pulls and pulls until you have to rip yourself from Arthur’s arms, turning away from him and hunching over. Coughing and gagging as your lungs try to rip themselves from your chest, Arthur rushes to you, resting a hand on your back. This hand doesn’t burn, it feels like your flesh is being seared off.   
“Go away Arthur” you warn quietly.   
He doesn’t move, instead pressing a little harder on your back.  
“(Y/N) I-“  
“Go away Arthur!” You yell, as violently as you can. Your outburst works, Arthur stills and backs away from you and you refuse to watch as he walks away.   
Instead, you repeat the process you’ve become so familiar with, dipping your fingers into your mouth and pulling. From the back of your throat you pull the longest sprig of lavender yet. It’s a tall cluster of three stems complete with roots and looks like you could have ripped it from the earth. All that’s missing is the soil. 

Beavers Hollow would be your graveyard, you concluded. You would inevitably starve yourself to death or collapse on the edge of camp. When the rest of the gang moved on to their next hiding spot, you would not follow and so that is why you left the next morning.   
Riding out of camp with nothing but the clothes on your back, you knew exactly where you needed to be. Despite the burning pain in your chest, despite needing to stop often, you rode fast and long until you reached the place you needed to be.  
Arthur’s flower field.   
Once you were close enough, you dismounted your horse. Not bothering to hitch her anywhere, instead choosing to remove her saddle entirely, you said a little goodbye and left for the field.   
The lavender sat a grim shade of purple under the grey sky, they moved violently in the wind, yet the weather was the last thing that scared you. It was the flowers. They beckoned you towards their ocean of blossoms and you followed. You were done fighting them.   
And now, with the flowers soaking your clothes in old rain, you wandered. Oddly calm given your condition, but with no purpose. A part of you was expecting you to just stop. Stop living, in the middle of the field.   
But you don’t, and slowly you wander through the flowers until you come across a small lake. So small and shallow it could almost be a pond. Settling down by the shore you took a deep breath. The scent of lavender from around and inside you was sickly, thick and suffocating, weighing on your already weak lungs.   
In the water you could see the reflection of the setting sun, and you smiled. You were tired. So tired, and you hadn’t slept in so long. Sinking lower, you lay yourself down on the bank of the water and turn onto your back. Your lungs groaned in protest, threatening to give in at any moment, but you didn’t care.   
From where you were, you could see the darkening sky and the heads of lavender that swayed into your vision. Letting your eyes flutter shut, you thought of him. Thought of Arthur when he first saw this field. That moment that you hadn’t even been witness to, but changed your life forever. And ended it as well.  
And calmly, but not without fear, you let yourself fall asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Come see me on tumblr @lavenderstages and request something maybe? or just have a chat!


End file.
